"How many fighters can you muster, all told?"
"We can put up about seventy 109s, and perhaps twenty 110 night fighters. Then our gypsy cousins the Rumanians have a squadron of Messerschmitts, and about sixty of their own fighters, IAR 80s. They're obsolete, but useful for picking off stragglers."
"You'll have to let me call my own shots about throwing the jet into the fight—I use fuel so fast that I'll have to be sure where the bombers are before I take off."
"You run your own show. I'll have my hands full here."
*
Benghazi/August 1, 1943
A manmade khamsin of wind and sand darkened the sky, tons of the desert shifted by the four propellers on each of 178 B-24 bombers. Jim Lee sat on Westerfield's right, feeling the fat-fuselaged plane tremble beneath them as the Sunday morning heat built, as he ran numbers in his mind. The aggregate fuel load of the bombing force was more than half a million gallons; they would be carrying more than a million pounds of bombs, five-hundred pounders and incendiaries. If they were successful, they could take out the refinery in twenty minutes; it would take a million-man army six months to fight its way inland from some Balkan second front to do the same job—and they might not make it.
Just under eighteen hundred men were poised at their crew stations, each one calculating the odds against them. The padres had had their hands full the night before. Some Christian men went to both Catholic and Protestant chaplains, covering their bets.
A Jeep pulled up in front of their B-24 and a harried-looking major got out. He climbed through the main entrance hatch and crawled forward to the cockpit, shook Westerfield by the shoulder, and said, "Come with me; you've got to fly Satan's Darling—the pilot started rectal bleeding, he's too sick with dysentery to go."
"Who's flying my airplane?"
"I guess Lee, here; we're sending a new copilot over. He's just arrived, hasn't got much time, but he'll have to do. We're short-handed, lots of people down with gyppo belly."
Westerfield sat for a moment, face white, then said, "You can do it, Jim."
The announcement didn't go well with the crew, but the mission procedures were rolling like a runaway locomotive and there were no alternatives. The takeoff from the dust-laden runway was uneventful, and Lee was personally comfortable as soon as he was airborne, circling to let the squadron, the 406th, join him. Its Liberators were just off the Ford production line, not camouflaged, their aluminum skin glistening in the rising sun. It was a brand-new outfit, eighteen aircraft strong, and by a quirk of abdominal fate, Lee was aircraft commander of the plane leading it.
All the ships were flying in the unusual V of V-formation, just as the old Keystone bombers had flown in the 1920s, going in so low the usual combat box wasn't workable. Lee's group were the tail end charlies, tacked on to the rear and high behind the 98th Bomb Group's pinkish-colored aircraft, the famous Pyramiders led by Killer Kane. They headed out to sea, five miles of jangling airborne nerves. From his elevated position at the end of the group, Lee could see the entire formation; just ahead was Westerfield's new airplane, Satan's Darling, tucked in the rear of the Pyramiders' formation.
After the mandatory intercom checks, the earphones fell ominously silent. The crew had worshiped their former leader, only tolerating Lee while they could make broad fun of his landings, confident that Westerfield could always save them. Now Lee was in the left seat, totally responsible for them and for the seventeen other ships in the formation.
He settled in, trying to ignore the frantic activity of the bright young copilot, Flight Officer Hal Nations, whose hands continuously and unnecessarily roved back and forth over every knob, switch, and button in the cockpit. To soothe him, Lee had pointed to a B-24 ahead of them—just as it feathered a prop and turned out of formation, heading for home. Nations turned to him and put up nine fingers—one for each of the aborts he'd counted, well above the normal rate. Was morale that bad?
The first real trouble started three hours out, just as they picked up their initial landfall, the island of Corfu. The lead ship, Wingo-Wango, carrying the primary mission navigator, began to waver, oscillating nervously, pitching up and down, the movements amplifying until the nose rose up, up, into a stall. Then, in dreamy slow motion, it turned over on its back and dove straight into the sea like a Mexican cliff-diver. There was no radio call, nothing. Flames and smoke burst from the surface, rising higher than the formation. Against all orders, the number two ship, carrying the deputy mission navigator, pulled out and circled down, dropping rescue rafts, as if anyone could have lived through the horrifying crash into the sea. The stupid gesture was a gross violation of discipline, jeopardizing the whole mission.
The intercom silence was broken by someone saying, "A total snafu." Lee wondered what would happen now that the two principal navigators were gone, for the disobedient second B-24 could never catch up.
As the mission moved on, the formations began to drift apart, as if the personalities of their leaders were opposite magnetic poles. Instead of the stately tight boxes of the European theater, where each ship was protected by the guns of the others, the Vs began to separate. Then, like squibs of toothpaste smeared on a mirror, billowy cumulus clouds appeared over the first geographic barrier, the nine-thousand-foot-high spine of Pindus mountains that ran from Albania down through Greece. The leading 376th group began a climb through the clouds to sixteen thousand feet. Behind them the rest of the formation bored in at twelve thousand, accepting the danger of flying in cloud rather than using the fuel and oxygen that would be needed to climb.
Lee saw the split, remembered that the tailwinds were considerably higher at altitude and would widen the gap between formations, and murmured to himself, "Snafu is right!"
*
Fighter Command Headquarters, Otopenii/August 1, 1943
The first warning came from the Wurzburg-type radar station on Mount Cherin, near Sofia: "Many aircraft, bearing thirty degrees."
As the Luftwaffe airwomen began making their first marks on the glass screen, Pitcairn turned to Josten. "This is it. The bastards are coming. The Bulgarians will have first crack at them, but all they've got are old Czech biplanes. I'm putting everyone on immediate alert."
Josten left to go to the field where his 262 was fueled and armed, just as the second report came in from Mount Cherin. "Lost contact. The aircraft have disappeared." It puzzled Pitcairn until a telephone report came in from a Rumanian ground station declaring that the target had to be Bucharest.
At Mizil, pilots full of an early lunch of soup, eggs, and fried potatoes ran to their Messerschmitt Bf 109s. In five minutes, fifty-two of the spindly-legged fighters had raced across the dusty field, joining formation even as their gear clanked into the wheel wells on the climb toward the incoming bombers.
Josten waited until the 109s made contact, deciding in the process that he would make as many tail-on attacks as he could, then pull out and try to pick off stragglers for as long as he had fuel and ammunition. He talked to himself as if he were briefing a Staffel: "Spread the shooting out, try to damage as many as possible. They've got a long way to go back, and if I can just shoot out an engine, they probably won't make it. Don't worry about kills, just cut them up and let the Rumanians finish them off."
The Liberators slid down mountain slopes, like kids on a banister, to race along at ground level, lifting a wing to go over trees, enjoying a National Geographic view of neatly laid out villages, beautiful fields, and horse-drawn hay wagons. A cheer went up on the interphone as they swept over a river where girls were bathing; there was instant consensus that they were bare-ass naked.
Lee thought, Maybe it's not a snafu after all; maybe we'll get away clean. The signs were looking good to him as the countryside unfolded beneath, checkpoints showing up on the ground just as they were marked along the red course line on the map he had folded at his side, a contingency in case the navigator, Fred Pola, was wounded. Lee could just see the lead ship of the first formation, miles ahead. He
hoped there wouldn't be many fighters; they had lost most of their formation integrity, and things would get worse when the flak opened up.
He ran his finger down the map; the first Initial Point, Pitesti, sixty-five miles from Ploesti, was coming up. Fifty miles after Pitesti was the second IP, Floresti, the final turn point for the thundering thirteen-mile, four-minute charge down the valley to the refineries. So far it was textbook perfect.
He was humming to himself when the lead formation began a turn. He called down to Lieutenant Pola, crouched in the nose of the B-24.
"Navigator, what's going on?"
"They're turning short; that's not the IP, it's a little town called Targoviste. They're heading straight for Bucharest!"
Lee hesitated for a moment and then broke radio silence.
"Mistake. Mistake. Turning short."
The lead bombers raced on.
"What are you going to do, Skipper?"
"We're going to follow orders; we'll turn at Floresti and bomb as planned."
"Roger; it's seven minutes now to Floresti; I'll give you a hack."
The two bomber formations soared majestically apart; Lee hoped his radio call hadn't been picked up by the Germans; they were low, maybe the mountains had blocked it out.
Mistakes even out. The German fighters had climbed through the mixed clouds, dirty gray on the bottom, silvery white on top. They sought the bright piercing sun canyons as they turned around the thunderstorms building up on the mountainsides. Breaking out on top at two thousand meters, they found the heavens empty.
The Messerschmitt fighter leader called, "Hallo, Otopenii, we're in Cancer sector now and there's not a damn Ami furniture van in sight."
"They must be above or below you; you are merged on the radar." Helmut Josten, monitoring the radio chatter at Mizil, ran to his aircraft to take off.
Below the circling Messerschmitts, screened by the clouds, the lead B-24s looked ahead in confusion as the smokestacks and towers of the Ploesti they were looking for dissolved into the buildings and churches of a major city.
"Christ, it's Bucharest! We must have turned early."
On board the lead B-24 the pilot was suddenly aware of his ghastly mistake. Without hesitation, he threw his aircraft into a stately ninety-degree turn that gave them an attack heading directly into the teeth of toughest batteries, parallel to the track of the flak train, as if he were following Generalmajor Gerstenberg's battle plan. Half of the formation turned with him; the rest thundered on toward Bucharest, adding their little bit to the billowing balls-up.
But at Otopenii, Major Pitcairn watched the course of the plots splitting on the glass map, thinking, Damn clever attack; they're sending one force in a feint on Bucharest, and hitting the refinery from two directions. Marvelous planning!
He turned to a busy Leutnant next to him and roared, "Where are the fighters now, damnit?"
"They should be making contact; the plots are overlapping."
Someone handed Pitcairn a telephone; he listened for a moment, then screamed in rage: "It's a low-level attack! Call the fighters and tell them to get below the clouds. Tell them to ignore the flak, to attack!"
The American bombers' propellers were harvesting wheat, the prop blast cutting shimmering waves through the fields. As they raced in, their shadows flashing ahead of them, a furious sheet of flak spewed from the defending 88s, the gunners firing with contact fuses over open sights.
The B-24s, specially fitted with four forward-firing machine guns for the pilot, their turrets trained ahead, dueled with the flak, trying to shoot their way through the defenses to bomb the refineries now just two minutes away. A balloon barrage loomed ahead—the pre-mission briefing had said, "We think the B-24 is strong enough to fly right through the cables." They were, but not strong enough to resist the contact-fused explosives strung like sugar dots on a licorice strip. Umbriago was the first to go, a victim of a balloon's cable, the wing blowing off and the fuselage breaking up in its few-seconds fall toward the ground, its crew trapped and immobilized by the centripetal G forces.
More B-24s fell to flak; an 88 shell blew the cockpit out of Detroit Maid and the bomber crashed into a field, plowing through a village schoolhouse to drop into a creek, sending blazing gasoline floating downstream. Another 88 shell clipped the rudder of Pretty Baby, sending it into a skidding turn that took it into the side of Oshkosh ByGosh, both planes vaporizing in a pink-black blast of bombs and fuel.
But most got through, dropping their bombs and pressing on, the roar of exploding storage tanks lost behind them as they dove to the deck, seeking refuge in the scant curvature of the earth, thankful for a copse of woods, a line of hedges.
Approaching on the preplanned course, in the opposite direction of the mixed-up first wave, Lee's throat tightened as the initial flurry of flak bursts, individual black puffs, suddenly roared into a wall of flame and smoke the length of Ploesti.
"They're hitting it from the south."
"Bomb doors open."
Lee held the airplane steady, waiting for the release, heading directly toward the boiling inferno. He started as the mass of smoke was ripped apart by pink and sandy wings as two groups of B-24s plunged out, some with props feathered, some burning, all of them firing. He heaved back on the control wheel to avoid the lead B-24, then plunged back down into the fray.
Ahead, he saw Westerfield's plane, Satan's Darling, take a hit in the fuselage; flames erupted from it as his bombs spilled out. The stricken B-24 staggered into a climb, two bodies dropping out of the back, no chance at all for their chutes to open. Westerfield's plane rolled and crashed directly into an oil storage tank, disappearing in flaming, fan-shaped spray.
The call "Bombs away" came as 20-mm flak shattered the cockpit windows of Lee's aircraft. The new Flight Officer glanced at him and signaled a thumbs up as Lee led them out of the inferno, the airplane hurt but still flying. They had been briefed to turn right to escape the target area; there was nothing but fire and flak in that direction and Lee hauled his airplane around to the left, leading the formation toward Campina in the north.
"Crew check."
The men checked in—no casualties.
"Tail gunner, how many airplanes with us?"
"I just counted them, sir, we came out with all seventeen. We really plastered the target, we won't be coming back here."
Lee eased back on the throttles; it was a long way home, and they hadn't seen any fighters yet.
"Anybody else back there?"
"No, sir, nobody here but us chickens."
Always a comedian in the crowd, Lee thought. He cranked his wing down and saw that the smoke and flames were now reaching twenty thousand feet into the air; he wondered how many of the other bombers had gotten through, if the tail gunner was right about not having to come back.
At least it proved his theory: even with a major navigational error, they had gone in low, blasted the target, and all eighteen in his formation had gotten away. He decided to stay low for another hour, hugging the side of the mountains, then begin his climb.
Twenty miles away horizontally and two miles higher, a very frustrated Helmut Josten was talking to Pitcairn on the radio.
"Where are they, Douglas? I haven't seen a damn airplane, nothing but smoke and flames."
"They came in low; our 109s have caught up with them in Cancer sector, course 240, southwest of Ploesti."
A low-level attack; the worst possible thing for Josten's fuel-gulping jet. Even if he found them now, he'd only have time for one or two attacks—he couldn't stay airborne more than forty minutes at low altitude.
As he turned he caught the silver glint of Lee's formation streaking north.
"Achtung. Liberators heading off to the north. Attacking."
It was not a pell-mell, hell for leather attack like the old days. The thoroughbred 262 needed careful handling. In a 109 he could have rolled over and pulled back on the stick, letting the airspeed build as fast as possible. Not with the 262—a steep
dive could compress the very air, stiffening the controls and perhaps leading to a breakup. Instead he swung around in a wide circle, throttle just slightly retarded, planning to arrive just below and behind the bombers. Still talking to himself, he said, "God, I wish I had the others with me. Can't fire until I'm sure of a hit."
Like a single hound in pursuit of a run of foxes, his 262 gobbled the distance as he went through the ritual arming of his guns.
In the lead B-24, Lee recognized panic in his tail gunner's voice.
"Skipper, we got company. A fighter, fast as anything, coming up behind." He paused and said, "I don't believe it! This bastard ain't got no propellers!"
Oh, my God—it's the jet, at last!
Josten took one last look at his fuel gauges and concentrated on the attack. The B-24s were not beautiful like the B-17s; they had fat bellies and too thin wings, and the big double tails looked vulnerable. He let the first Liberator fill the Revi 16B reflector gunsight and pressed the firing button; the B-24 seemed to break up instantly from the three-second rumble of his guns. It burst into flames, the left gear falling from its well as the wing folded up and back. He skidded to the right, took another Liberator in his sights, and exploded it in a brilliant red ball.
Josten almost felt sorry for the Americans, to be so vulnerable, to fly an airplane so slow and so fire prone! He'd made a steep climbing turn and now dove back to the attack.
One of the Liberators was falling behind. He fired and the B-24 pulled up in a violent stall, then began to break up, parts shredding from it even as it turned over for the last dive.
The rest of the Americans were already diving even closer to the ground, sending a screen of machine-gun fire in his direction. He checked his gauges once again, then dove after the fleeing bombers, now heading for the cloud-masked mountaintops. Good enough—a rock-filled cloud could kill even better than a cannon.
Eagles at War Page 25
